Jürgen Nefzger

Jürgen Nefzger - Dunkerque

« In Dunkirk, Jürgen Nefzger explores the periphery of the town: a crucial place to capture the state of a given urban culture. This is where the town is growing today. It is here that it is in conflict with the rural environment. At this frontier, contradictions are evident, and the photographer can dissect the body of urban sprawl and its imperfect outlines. His Dunkirk series regularly evokes Romantic pictorial language or that of a certain poetics of the zone, which is comparable to that found in films by Tarkovsky or Antonioni. (…)
In the battle that opposes the natural landscape to the industrial landscape, Nefzger invites a third actor : the inhabitants. The undefined space between the city and its harbor area becomes a public space in a strong sense of the word, where individuals take their place freely.
On the margins of imposing industrial installations, he discovers the calm of unoccupied, abandoned territories being quietly reclaimed. This all happens in a hybrid, imperfect space that cannot be labelled due to the lack of an adequate category: it is outside the urban zone, at the edge of the industrial sites, but not far enough away to be considered as natural. »

Christophe Catasaros in Dunkerque , Archibooks , 2007